The rehabilitation policy, allowing those who had crossed the LoC and are living in PaK to return home is witnessing stiff opposition, with very few people in the mainstream supporting it. Kashmir life report.
After leaking it selectively to Jammu newspapers, the government finally notified the so called rehabilitation policy last week. The policy that instantly became controversial after a section of the security grid opposed it in 2007 is intended at facilitating the return of youth who had crossed the LoC to get arms training and join militants but have given up insurgent activities due to a change of heart and are willing to return.
The notified policy (Home 1376 (ISA) of 2010, dated November 23, 2010) is applicable to all the youth who are state subjects (along with their wives and children) who have crossed over between January 1, 1989 and December 31, 2009 – a period of 20 years. These youth have to follow a set procedure using proper channels.
=The policy drafted after prolonged consultations with all the security agencies and the union home ministry lays a lengthy procedure to avail the ‘package’. Under the system, those willing to return or their parents will have to fill up a form (being made available on the internet) that will undergo scrutiny at executive police level and then by the state and central intelligence agencies. The application has to be addressed to the concerned Superintendent of Police (SP) who is the designate authority.
Once an application is received, the entire security grid will draft a dossier listing cases pending against him on basis of which they will decide whether a permission to return can be granted or not. Once a formal order is issued by the home ministry, the person can return using Slamabad (Uri), Chankan-da-Bagh (Poonch), Attari (Punjab) or Indira Gandhi International Airport, (Delhi). At the entry point, however, they will have to produce an emergency certificate that India’s High Commission will issue to the person in Islamabad. All the agencies including the Bureau of Immigration will be intimated by the security grid.
“After completion of the formalities at the crossing points, the returnees and their dependents will be escorted to the state and the district authorities will be duly informed,” the cabinet decision said. Their wives and children, who have PaK origins, will have to follow the existing laws of the land and the necessary certificate for entry will be issued to them. For three months or for such longer time as would be necessary till they are thoroughly interviewed, de-briefed and all necessary documentation is prepared, they along with their wives and children will have to stay in counseling centers that the government would establish. They, however, will be prosecuted for all the cases of “serious” nature. They will be trained in different skills in ITI’s and other training institutions while being monitored by security agencies for at least two years.
It is not a general amnesty. Interestingly, however, the policy does not make a distinction between the youth who had crossed over to get trained as militants and the huge population that migrated. In early days of militancy the counter insurgency grid depopulated vast belts of population living near the LoC across J&K. The population is living in scores of refugee camps in the length and breadth of the PaK.
Apart from thousands of Kashmiri refugees living across PaK, there are hundreds of young men who had gone to get trained as militants but could not or did not return. Some of them have settled, married local girls and started small businesses. The trend of their voluntary return had started in early 2006 and continued till the middle of 2007 when the police strongly advised army against accepting any surrender on the LoC. By the time, the practice was stopped, army had accepted 184 surrenders including a few women who had married Kashmiri youth.
Their return was being managed by the army at the ground level using their families to get them back. On April 20, 2007, army accepted the surrender of a group of 24 militants who crossed over and straightaway drove to the nearest garrison where their families were waiting for them. The trickle had started soon after Dr Mohammad Hamid Ansari (now the vice president), as head of one of the five Working Groups, made a recommendation in this regard and submitted his report.
In his recommendation, Ansari had asked for careful assessment of the number of Kashmiri youth willing to return from PaK and only those can be considered for peaceful return and rehabilitation that joined militancy for misguided ideological reasons, monetary considerations or were forced into militancy. The WG has actually said that an effective method for the proper verification of the identity of the willing person be devised and given a time frame following which the existing rehabilitation policy could be extended. As youth started flocked in, the security agencies started lobbying against the initiative saying it would jeopardize the overall security.
As the practice stopped in 2007, the youth started taking other routes. At least a dozen cases were reported in 2009 alone in which the boys, some of them with families, managed to reach Kashmir and surrendered before the police. This time they chose to use the Nepal route.
Almost four years after Ansari’s Working Group recommendations, the state government finally came with the policy. This was after the NC and PDP leaders had detailed meetings with the Prime Minister asking early clearance to the policy. CPI (M), in fact, moved a resolution in the state legislature seeking a mechanism but it felt flat.
Interestingly nobody knows what could be the number of such youth, more so, how many of them are interested in availing this ‘package’. Reports appearing in the media indicate that they could be somewhere between 1000 and 3000.
Regardless of the fate of the policy, it had a dramatic impact on the political landscape in the valley. It was perhaps the first move of NC that sent the opposition PDP responding.
“We basically proposed it and then it was upheld by almost everybody including one of the working groups that Prime Minister set up,” party spokesman Naeem Akhter said. “It was delayed but it has been announced but we have serious doubts if this government has the will and the ability to implement it.”
“Can the policy be implemented by a government that has already waged a war against a generation which is living within the state,” said Akhter. “Jails are filled to the brim and hundreds are on the run fearing repression and then you have a hostile relationship between Islamabad and New Delhi.” PDP’s was perhaps the only voice supportive of it. BJP opposed the policy saying it was an appeasement to the anti-national elements.
“This is an anti-national decision and we won’t tolerate it. The government is rewarding those people who took up arms to disintegrate the nation. We will not be mute spectators. We have decided to launch an agitation against this move. To start with, we will observe chakka jam (traffic blockade) for three hours on November 27,” BJP State president Shamsher Singh Manhas said. “How can we tolerate a policy which seeks to grant money and rehabilitation to the terrorists who went to Pakistan and PaK for waging a war against the Indian nation,” Prof Chaman Lal Gupta was quoted saying.
Even Omar’s alliance partner Congress is also not supportive of it, at least publicly, especially after the BJP criticism. It has been part of the decision that cabinet took after the plan was drafted and approved by the home ministry. Even at the national level the party has taken the plea that the policy was not discussed in the coordination committee of the ruling coalition. Apart from BJP criticism, Congress is feeling uneasy as it believes it may have an adverse impact on its “vote bank” in Jammu where the right wing parties have been fighting for “rights to Pakistani refugees” for the last several decades. The party is foreseeing a rout in the Panchayat elections which is round the corner.
This has led NC to come in open. “It is a landmark decision and the most effective confidence-building measure to provide relief to the families which have been waiting since long for the return of their kith and kin,” party spokesman Sheikh Ghulam Rasool said in a statement. Later, Omar personally spoke on the issue saying there was nothing anti-national in the policy. “‘There is nothing wrong with the policy. It has been framed after due deliberations and after talking to the union home minister,” he said.
